[Python-ideas] Non-English names in the turtle module.

[Al Sweigart]

I completely agree that Python and codebases already in English should
remain in English. And I want the source code for turtle.py to stay in
English as well. This is where the gray area for Turtle begins though.

Turtle is not for professional developers, where the English expectation is
there. It is used for school kids to program in, and this code will most
likely be forgotten about a week after the programming assignment is done.
And in a sense, turtle.py is not used as a module by kids so much as an app
(albeit a scriptable one) that moves the turtle around and draws shapes.

The language barrier is a very real one for non-technical instructors,
parents, and students. If we could minimize it down to less than a dozen
Python keywords & names (import turtle, for, in, range, while, if, else)
that would be a significant gain for Python's reach.

And I don't think it would be much technical debt for turtle.py. I hope to
have a complete translated set soon so I can submit a patch that shows how
light of a change this would be.

-Al

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:02 PM, Stéphane Wirtel <stephane at wirtel.be> wrote:

> I do agree with the comments of Ludovic about the source code, Python is
> in English, the code for an open source project is international, and in
> this case, I prefer English.
>
> In the past, I have seen some databases in french, with the accents é, è,
> ç in the columns of the database, that’s really ugly :/ because if you
> forgot the encoding in the database, you will have a problem.
>
> Yesterday, I have read a source code in Dutch, sorry but if you don’t know
> this language, good luck if you want to change the code.
>
> And an other example, the comments in the code of the EuroPython site is
> in Italian, ok, the project has been developed for PyCon Italia, but now,
> we are a lot of international developers on this code, and sincerely, I can
> speak Italian but not everybody.
>
> Sincerely, English for the code and the database!
>
>
> On 4 Sep 2015, at 21:56, Ludovic Gasc wrote:
>
> Thank you for the link, it's interesting.
>>
>> However, my remark it's mainly for the source code: Even if I sincerely
>> think it's better to handle English the most possible you can, I see no
>> issues to discuss about source code in your native language: I speak
>> myself
>> in French when I interact with French developers only in my company.
>>
>> Nevertheless, for the content of the source code or database structure, at
>> least to me, you must write in English: I've already analysed source code
>> in Dutch, it was a lot more complicated to understand the code, I've lost
>> a
>> lot of time for nothing.
>> The world is now global and dev resources are enough rare to avoid to lock
>> your source code content in a local language.
>>
>> See for example the big work of LibreOffice to translate German comments:
>>
>> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks/Translation_Of_Comments
>>
>> With a localized turtle, you should give a bad habit at the beginning.
>>
>> --
>> Ludovic Gasc (GMLudo)
>> http://www.gmludo.eu/
>>
>> 2015-09-04 14:18 GMT+02:00 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 01:34:16PM +0200, Ludovic Gasc wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm agree with Matthias: IT world is mostly English based.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Fortunately for the 95% of the world who speak English as a second
>>> language, or not at all, that is changing. For example, StackOverflow
>>> has a very successful Brazilian site, and they make the case for
>>> non-English speakers well:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> https://blog.stackexchange.com/2014/02/cant-we-all-be-reasonable-and-speak-english/
>>>
>>> Rather than just repeat what they say there, I will just ask everyone to
>>> read it.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Steve
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>
>
> --
> Stéphane Wirtel - http://wirtel.be - @matrixise
>
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